The Cinematic Arts Project also produced a “behind-the scenes” film, a short documentary, and webisodes for the website, which were produced by members of the club’s publicity team. The teams all worked in collaboration with mentors, teachers, and volunteers from the local film community on collaborative film projects. The club met several times a week for many hours at a time, as well as on weekends, in order to finish the films in time to submit to local and international festivals. The students gained real world experience producing films, working together, fundraising, and publicizing the films; they screened their films at local events as a way to raise funds. The mentors and teachers were well connected within the local film community, which enabled students to gain access to resources and expertise. The students involved with the project were dedicated, ambitious, and creative; many viewed the project as a professional and entrepreneurial opportunity rather than a school project or hobby (see chapter 5).
Motivations and Incentives for Participation
If all of this is sounding positive, it’s because it is. The well-intentioned clubs and dedicated teachers and mentors undoubtedly had a positive influence in the lives of the students involved with the club; this is evident from countless stories like that of Devan, who attributed academic success and even the ability to graduate to the help of Mr. Lopez and the media clubs. Research demonstrates that after-school programs, such as the Digital Media Club and the Cinematic Arts Project, can have positive developmental outcomes in the lives of young people (Daud and Carruthers 2008; Nicholson, Collins, and Holmer 2004), particularly for economically disadvantaged or marginalized young people (Mahoney, Parente, and Zigler 2009). I do not want to appear dismissive of their efforts and the successes of the clubs; however, in order to experience long term and meaningful benefits it is not enough for young people to merely join a program, but rather they must become psychologically engaged. Research unsurprisingly evidences that individuals who are engaged learn more than disengaged individuals (Gottfried, Fleming, and Gottfried 1998). Engagement is the result of many factors, not least of which intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I do not think we can overlook the role of motivation in shaping young people’s engagement and participation with media and technology. We must also consider how opportunity and motivation are also mediated and regulated via other aspects of students’ lives.
For the young people mentioned in this book, learning about digital media was constructed as both a means to an end as well as a goal in and of itself. And while the club was accomplishing a lot of good, we need to step back and take a more holistic approach to understanding the role of both digital media and education as risk intervention strategies. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly aware that media and technology in and of themselves are not solutions to any given problem and research demonstrates that not all media practices are equally valued by students or educational institutions (Sims 2014). As was noted earlier, such an assumption is technologically determinist and ignores the cultural, material, and economic context in which individuals access, use, and make meaning through and with technology. Such expectations ignore the extent to which learning happens within social contexts and the ways in which sociality mediates attitudes, meaning, and uses of technology. Alongside the many positive interventions and success stories, we need to evaluate outcomes and experiences critically in order to understand what the clubs accomplished and as a way to identify disconnects between expectations, aspirations, and actual industry opportunities.
The clubs, as well-intentioned as they were, also have the potential to reproduce the very inequalities they strive to alleviate; there were missed opportunities for fostering the deeper, more critical, and democratic digital literacies required for full participation in a digital and participatory culture. Those concerns are where I now turn my attention, as will be analyzed through an examination of four case studies: those of Sergio, Javier, Selena, and Gabriela. All four students had an interest in and expectations of perusing media as a career option, which allows us to analyze how media fit heuristically within the different nodes of their lives.
Career or College? Expectations of Future Opportunities for Sergio and Javier
Sergio (18 years old, Mexican-American) and Javier (18 years old, Mexican immigrant) were both seniors who were heavily invested in the Cinematic Arts Project at Freeway High. They developed a friendship as part of the club and worked together on several film projects both in and out of school. Both Sergio and Javier aspired to work in the film industry after graduating high school and both were moderately academically engaged, but in different ways. However, Sergio and Javier’s expectations for how to pursue a film career differed in significant ways.
Figures 7.3 and 7.4 illustrate Sergio’s and Javier’s learning ecologies. At first glance, it may appear as though the young men had similar goals and opportunities; however, their expectations of how to make connections to pursue and achieve their goals meant they followed two different—and unequal—pathways after high school.
Figure 7.3 Sergio’s learning ecology.
Figure 7.4 Javier’s learning ecology.
Although Sergio earned relatively good grades and strove to do well in school, as a first-generation immigrant student whose parents had a middle school and high school education he did not view college as the most viable option after high school. When asked if his parents had helped prepare him for college of a career after graduation, Sergio responded:
They haven’t really helped me in any other way, just a roof above my head, food, and stuff like that. But, like, I mean, ’cause they’re from Mexico, they don’t really know how everything works here, in America, so they can’t really help me out with that as much as other people can. … ’Cause all my dad ever applies to is construction ’cause that’s all he knows ‘cause he doesn’t have a high school degree or college degree, nor does my mom so all she knows how to do is, like, janitorial stuff, so that’s all she applies to.
As the son of immigrant parents, Sergio was navigating unfamiliar pathways. The opportunities available to him at Freeway were helping him develop valuable skill sets, but Sergio’s family lacked the connections and social capital necessary to develop viable future options. As the model of his learning ecology illustrates, there were disconnections between his academic engagement, resources at home, social network, and opportunities for a career in the film industry. Javier, on the hand, had emigrated from Mexico with his parents and an older sister at the age of 14. His father was the Spanish teacher at Freeway and his mother occasionally worked as a musician. His father had graduated from college in Mexico and his sister was currently pursuing a college degree in film in Mexico. The differences in Sergio’s and Javier’s family situations influenced their own expectations and shaped their perspectives of creative digital media career options.
Like many immigrant families, Sergio lived in a multi-generational home with his extended family. He had emigrated from Mexico with his mother and his older siblings when he was only two years old. His parents were still married; however his father had lived in Mexico separated from the rest of the family for the past 16 years. In fact, Sergio had met his father only a few times, most recently on a trip to Mexico when he was 15 years old. Sergio’s mother was effectively a single mother who had raised her four children in the US. Sergio and his mother shared a converted one room garage bedroom that was attached to his sister and brother-in-law’s home; his two younger nieces and a nephew also shared the home. He had an older brother and sister who also lived nearby.
Sergio’s family had one outdated computer in the home, which was shared by all seven family members. He did not have a mobile phone, but he often borrowed a Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch from his friend Antonio (17 years old, Mexican-American). Although the iPod provided a way for Sergio to stay connected to his peers and a way to watch videos and search the Internet, it limited the kinds of media he could create. When it came to producing media he preferred to hang out after school in t
he media club, which provided him access to his friends, as well as to expensive media editing software and high-quality computers.
Sergio’s mother had a high school education, and was enrolled in English classes at a church during the time of the study; his father had quit pursing formal education after middle school in order to earn money for the family. The only person in Sergio’s family to have gone to college was his older brother, who had attended a local community college for one year before deciding to work full time. However, despite a lack of educational role models at home, Sergio could be described as moderately academically engaged. He cared about his studies and knew how to get work done quickly to pass his classes and have more free time for filmmaking. He enjoyed reading and math, was full of curiosity, enjoyed learning, and shared a mutual respect with most of his teachers.
However, what really excited Sergio was filmmaking. Often sacrificing sleep and other responsibilities to work on film, Sergio spent nearly all of his out-of-school time (and a lot of his in-school time) working on film projects with peers. He considered his interest to be more than a mere hobby, and referred to filmmaking as his “work.” He took a lot of pride in what he created, but he was also quite critical of himself. He compared his work to professional films and was always striving to make his own films better and more professional. Rather than seeing it as merely an outlet for self-expression or a hobby he shared with friends, Sergio deliberately invested time in his film projects, expecting that they would pay off financially in the future. This investment often came at the expense of other academic work and grades. He considered his participation in the Cinematic Arts Project as training for the post-graduation workforce: “Right now I’m doing things like writing scripts and making movie so I can build up a portfolio and then submit it to, like, places. And probably have my potential first part-time job in a film industry company or something like that.” His assumption that he would submit his portfolio to “like, places” is indicative of his own unfamiliarity with navigating a creative career path.
Javier’s interest in film was similar to Sergio’s in that he too aspired to be a professional filmmaker and invoked a discourse of professionalization when discussing his films: “I think projects like [the ones we do in the Cinematic Arts Project] help me to be artistically more mature because you’re working with other people that know about what you’re doing and you have this big responsibility because now it’s not, ‘Ah, I’m just doing my short film, whatever.’ It’s professional, it’s good work.” Javier’s family was more upwardly mobile than Sergio’s. His mother struggled to find consistent work in the United States, so the family lived primarily off his father’s teaching salary. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment just around the corner from the school. Javier had access to the family’s shared Internet-enabled computer. Like Sergio, he did not have a mobile phone. He spent much of his leisure time at home watching foreign and amateur films on YouTube. Javier was a mature teen who was quick to engage in philosophical conversations about politics and the world. Well liked by his teachers and peers, he was looked up to by many of the students in the clubs. He had established himself as a peer expert within the space, and other students often came to him for help with their own projects. He was simultaneously balancing school work, projects for the clubs, his own personal projects, and collaborating on films and scripts with his peers. Javier invested more time in film than in school. He did not consider grades very important, valuing creativity and personal expression above more traditional academic courses and rigor.
Javier admitted to staying up much too late working on film projects. Toward the end of the spring semester, some members of the film club had failed to edit the “behind the scenes” footage for a short film they were working on; Javier took on the extra workload. He recalled this as follows.
Javier:
So, I had to edit it in one night. I really didn’t sleep at all, and I didn’t come to school because I had to do that.
Q:
So you stayed at home?
Javier:
Yeah. Finally, I had to sleep.
Q:
So, did you have software at home to do it then?
Javier:
No. I borrowed a computer. I needed ten minutes of behind the scenes footage. And when I did it, it was, like, really intense. It was so much work. I think it sounds hard, and it is really hard, and it is a lot of work, and it is a lot of time that you have to spend, and you get really tired, but I think you can manage that because of the passion that you have. When you have that dream of film, “I want to do it. I want to do it.” That’s what helps you do it because if you don’t have the backup it’s hard to do it. Sometimes it gets really, really hard.
As this quotation demonstrates, Javier’s passion for film sometimes took a toll on his school work and physical health. He was often tired when I met with him, but he felt his investments were worth the sacrifices. His school work often suffered, but he maintained passing grades so he could continue to fully participate in the after-school activities.
Although Sergio was somewhat more invested in academics and cared more about his grades than Javier, it was Javier who expected to go to college, not Sergio. Javier intended to move back to Mexico, take a year off of school to work on films, and then apply to the university where his sister was currently pursuing a film degree. Sergio, on the other hand, did not consider college to be a viable option, despite the fact that he had decent grades, enjoyed learning, and had friends who were college-bound. He would occasionally talk about trying to go to the University of Southern California (USC), but had not made plans to apply, had not taken the SAT,9 had not filled out FAFSA forms,10 and had not attended any of the college readiness workshops offered by the school. In fact, he missed one of the college-readiness workshops because he was too busy working on a film for the Cinematic Arts Project. Even though he occasionally mentioned college, it was not a realistic expectation (especially an expensive, highly competitive, out-of-state private school such as USC), nor was he actively pursuing steps to achieve this aspiration. In actuality, Sergio was anxious and even felt pressured to get a job and start earning money after graduation. He was connected to peers with larger social networks and access to greater capital; thus his answers reflected middle-class aspirations, but he did not appear to give any real consideration to applying to colleges. Sergio viewed his digital media courses and the after-school club as vocational training, rather than as academic pursuits. In contrast, Javier, who was not particularly academically engaged, considered his digital media courses and the club to be an investment in his academic and career future.
For students who were disengaged with formal learning environments, it seemed creative digital media production and the club provided a potentially alternative pathway to success and career opportunities. Many of these students navigated a daily situation with unstable financial resources and unreliable or nonexistent peer and familial networks (as potential sources of social and cultural capital). Despite these situations, many students still engaged in robust and deeply fulfilling connected learning environments facilitated through their participation with media production and digital media networks. In this way, motivation for future-driven success influenced participants’ engagement in the clubs and learning about digital media. Identification as an artist and producer, combined with a recognition that digital media was more than just a hobby, shaped opportunities for learning and participation, which are key elements for sustained motivation (Dawes, and Larsen 2011). Digital media were constructed not just as tools for media production but also as opportunities for future success.
Although Sergio and Javier constructed similar narratives about the value of media production in their lives, the college-bound versus vocational expectations had different influences on their future-oriented aspirations. They both valued digital media and film, but they imbued their practices with differing meanings. Having watched his older sister successfully graduate from Fre
eway and be admitted to film school in Mexico, Javier considered digital media and filmmaking to be a means to an end—college and later a career. He presumed that his average grades would not hold him back from pursuing a degree in the creative arts, and thus he invested the majority of his time, intellectual curiosity, and creativity into film.
Sergio on the other hand, strived to earn decent grades to make his mother proud, but did not make the connection that his grades could help him continue a post-high school education. Rather, for Sergio, developing better digital media and film skills was the ultimate goal. He approached his media classes and experiences in the club as a pathway to a future career without the need for additional education. Though he valued the creative process, he also viewed his experiences within a vocational context. This is not surprising when contextualized within the broader culture of Freeway, which encouraged and prepared students for vocational training. Sergio’s career-oriented aspirations were not problematic in and of themselves. However, unlike more traditional and established vocational tracks, the digital media industry offers fewer employment opportunities for high school graduates. At present there aren’t pathways to career opportunities in digital and creative media that are as well established and structurally supported as the pathways in other vocational tracks (automotive, hospitality, HVAC, and so on.). Thus, Sergio’s goals and interest in creative media as part of a vocational track becomes problematic when those pathways to future opportunities are disconnected from and not fully supported by the institutions in which they are embedded.
Worried About the Wrong Things Page 34